I taught English courses at Ozark Christian College for many years, and retiring last year was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I loved the subjects I had taught with great enthusiasm, and I loved my students. Naturally I had to mourn.

Mourning is how I began a non-fiction book that College Press, a local publishing company, asked me to write twenty years ago. Framing a Rainbow is a celebration of parenting, but the first chapter is called, “My Heart Hurts,” a phrase my older daughter Stacey coined the summer after she graduated from high school. She said it when she, her sister Leanne, and I  spontaneously formed a group hug at the close of an annual camp for highschoolers we had always attended together—they were campers, I was on staff. We immediately adopted the phrase and have had several occasions to use it through the years.

“My heart hurts” certainly described me the day I left both girls in their college dorm room. This was true, despite the fact that I drove by their dorm every week day morning as I went to class and the equally amazing fact that I had both of them (gluttons for punishment?) in one of my classes. Anyone who has sent a child out of town or, worse, out of the state to college would have little sympathy for me. I understand.

But you must understand that, though I saw them often, the four of us no longer shut our door against the world each night and woke up together each morning to cope with that world or even to bless it. Tony and I didn’t hear them in their bathroom taking off their makeup every night, laughing about one thing or another. I couldn’t find them in their beds at night to kiss them goodnight, and if they were out late, they couldn’t come in and plop on our bed to tell us what was happening. Things would never be the same.

Oh, things would be good, very good (we love our sons-in-law and don’t get me started today on the grandchildren), but I had to mourn a lovely time that would never come again.

 So the day I left them putting the finishing touches on the dorm room they shared, I came home, looked at the rooms they had left behind, and then sat down on the sofa to try to grasp such an event. I looked up at a large wall portrait of them we’d gotten only the day before. In it they are leaning against a tree, looking off into the horizon. Stacey’s head is resting on Leanne’s shoulder as the sun breaks through the clouds and shines on both of them. It seemed symbolic.

And sitting alone on the couch that afternoon, I heard thunder begin to rumble outside, and that seemed symbolic as well. As did the black clouds and the wind and the sheets of rain that began to beat against the windows. Tony, my sweet husband, their dedicated father, was out, and I was half glad. I could cry in peace, and I thought it quite decent that nature mourned with me.

I also thought it decent that the storm was brief and that in just forty-five minutes or so the sun was shining in its full August glory. I decided that was symbolic, too.

I thanked God for all the symbolism. 

Of course, forty-five minutes would never do for the kind of mourning I would find appropriate for such a passage, for the emptying of the nest. But it may have been close to adequate since I had gone through the bulk of it the year before when Stacey left home for college while Leanne finished her last year of high school. Then, Leanne was as bereft as I.

Tony didn’t get it, not then and not a year later when I had to leave Leanne there, too, and drive home alone. He had kissed them goodbye when he had helped us load the car to set out on our three mile journey to OCC. He’s an Ecclesiastes kind of guy. For him it is true: there is a time for everything under heaven, including a time to live at home and a time to leave!

Well, okay then, as I like to say. But what a nut he is, as crazy as we are for thinking leaving home is a time to weep and mourn. Though in choosing happy and grateful acceptance, Tony has chosen the easier, far less messy way.

So my daughters, grown now with precious children of their own, were not surprised at what happened when I went in to tell Dr. Mark Scott, our academic dean and my friend, that I was going to retire after teaching at OCC for more than a quarter of a century. I cried. Can you imagine? I cried! I’m sure he wished I had sent a letter.

Well, why not shed a few tears? I was beginning the mourning of a precious time that would not come again.

Makes perfect sense to me.